Early Radio Memories (3)

Listening to radio stations which broadcast from exotic places was not simply a matter of hearing a diversity of programmes in a host of languages; it was also about obtaining proof from those stations that you had actually heard them.  This involves submitting a reception report via the mail, hence the need for overseas postage and occasionally (for smaller, third world stations) an enclosed International Reply Coupon.  Having listened to, for example, Radio New Zealand, the DXer (a new, proper noun!) would write up a report that included date and time, frequency tuned, quality of reception, programme details and the equipment used.  It would then be posted to the station in the hope that a verification card or letter would be received. This was known (is known) as the QSL, from the Q code beloved of ham radio operators the world over, meaning that the message has been confirmed.  Often these took weeks, even months to arrive, but the opening of the envelope on arrival was always a moment of pleasure!

Sometimes it was a simple, signed postcard.  Occasionally there would arrive a large envelope stuffed with goodies!  The larger broadcasters liked to do this, and I received pennants and magazines from Moscow and Havana, as well as posters from Peking and a copy of Mao Tse-tung’s “Little Red Book.”  (This would live next to my poster of Che Guevara!)

Short wave was a wonderful place in those days, for we were still emerging from the chilliest part of the Cold War. Apart from the BBC and the Voice of America, the big three broadcasters, all Marxist-Maoist in nature, were Radio Moscow, Radio Peking and surprising Albania.  Radio Tirana not only punched above its weight, it also developed the reputation of producing the dullest and most sonorous programming!

All this was, to a teenager, exotic and appealing.  Britain in the early 1970s was rather dull and grey with low horizons and sometimes even lower expectations, but pulling on a pair of headphones changed all of that.  There was a different world out there!

Early Radio Memories (2)

I used the phrase “slippery slope” in an earlier post, but before I invite you to join me in that particular broadcast helter-skelter I’d like to keep the whole story in balance and mention the other, conventional side of my radio hobby.  Listening.  Yet listening with a difference.  Tuning in to radio stations the other side of the world.

The popular name for this in the radio world is DXing.  Whereas not a proper acronym it has come to be understood as “distance listening” on all parts of the radio spectrum.  My favorite parts, and a new discovery for me in those days, were the short wave bands.  I had been given a new and shiny blue and Bakelite “chrome” radio and in addition to the usual medium and long wave bands it had short wave.  A mystery to me, but one I continue to enjoy even forty five years later.

Not content with the slender telescopic antenna that the radio provided, I had read that extending this by a long wire would vastly increase reception of very far away stations.  Given that my receiver (it had now been promoted from the rank of transistor radio) was on my desk in my bedroom this required an imaginary approach and an enormous spool of thin, plastic-coated wire.  And a bit of dare-devil roof work!  Climbing out of a third storey window in the red brick Victorian vicarage, gingerly clambering up some ten feet of tiles to reach the wide and level lead roof drains, throwing some fifty feet of wire over a gable in the hope that it was reach my bedroom window (it did!) and tossing the spool of the remaining one hundred and fifty feet towards the back of the house.  This I retrieved from a flower bed and anchored it to a tall tree on the other side of the garden.  Two hundred feet of antenna in place sixty feet above the ground, and I had not broken anything or annoyed my parents.  Easy, and in business!

It has to be said that my parents fully supported my new hobby and passion.  They agreed to pay for a monthly subscription to the magazine Practical Wireless, now proving essential to all aspects of my radio interests, and even surprised me with the gift of a “retro” receiver kit – the Hear All Continents valve (U.S. tube) radio which required over ninety volts of power but was an amazing receiver in all its simplicity.  I was truly hooked, and began saving up money for postage stamps and International Reply Coupons…

(To be continued)

Early Radio Memories (1)

Worcester, England.  The year was 1971 and I was not yet fifteen years old.  The Irish Republican Army had bombed the Post Office Tower in London, decimal currency had been introduced in the UK, sixty-three people had been killed in a stairway crush at a Celtic-rangers soccer game, and the yearly inflation rate was 8.6%.  Of course I was largely unaware of these dreadful things as a young teen, my interests and influences lying elsewhere.  Setting aside school for the moment, for I was not the most excellent of pupils, I think it accurate and fair to say that my life was ruled and shaped by two things.  Rugby and music.  Now that’s an odd combination of the conservative and the progressive.  I would eagerly await the monthly magazine Rugby World, yet at the same time pore over the pages of New Musical Express (as well as the scurrilous “underground” presses of Oz and Frendz.)

But music was expensive.  A vinyl LP cost in the region of two pounds sterling which was outside of the immediate reach of my pockets.  Buying an album required careful saving and then selection.  As a result there was much lending and borrowing of vinyl, and with the advent of the cassette tape recorder much illicit recording as well!  Records were played on a Decca mono player in my room, or occasionally on the new stereo radiogram in my father’s study.  Now that was a great sound!

Radio was the solution, and looking back I realize that this is how my interest began.  There was little in the way of pop radio in the UK at that time.  Radio One, the BBC’s answer to the offshore stations of the 1960s, was bland, boring and entirely establishment.  Not the station for us radical, rebellious, anti-establishment public school types who nevertheless wanted to go to university and be successful!  (For U.S. readers that reads “private” school.) Besides R1 only broadcast during daylight hours, sharing its frequency with another station, Radio Two, after seven o’clock.  It was good for one show however – Pick of the Pops with Alan Freeman every Sunday between five and seven.  Then the entire “Top 20” would be played with minimum talk, making it relatively easy to record the entire music collection whilst fading out before the end of each song!

An alternative in the evening was the mighty Radio Luxembourg which broadcast pop music on 208 metres via a thirteen thousand kilowatt transmitter (the most powerful privately owned transmitter in the world back then) from the Grand Duchy, but somehow that wasn’t the best of media.  It was to an offshore station, Radio North Sea International, broadcasting from the radio ship Mebo 2 on medium wave and short wave that we all turned.

This is isn’t the place to recall the history of RNI.  Wikipedia does it rather well http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_North_Sea_International

and there are many other columns besides written about their exploits.  It is enough to say that not only did it provide us young teens with a music channel that truly appealed to us, it planted in the minds of some of us the notion that radio ought to be free and unfettered, and not under the control of governments or corporations.  And that was, some might say, a slippery slope!

(Also posted on the sister blog: 55555.)

BOTTLED UP MEMORIES

It’s very refreshing, in many senses of the word, to see that the enormous Coca Cola Company (which, I’m told, owns the world’s largest share of bottling plants as well as huge tracts of property in Eastern Europe) continues to produce good old-fashioned cola in good old-fashioned glass bottles. And this is Coke.  Not Diet Coke, although that is also bottled; neither diet, caffeine-free Coke, which is simply a travesty of a drink.  No, this is Coke.  Straight.  And I like it.  I am aware that these days it contains the demonic high fructose corn syrup, but as I ordinarily drink one small bottle every blue moon I can hardly hear the funeral directors rubbing their hands with glee.  Yet.

And it is also a drink with gallons of personal nostalgia, for swallowing it (and I believe that the only way to drink Coke is from the bottle through a straw) I am transported back fifty years to the Snack Bar and Diner in the coastal village of Polzeath in the far south west of the old country.  For it was there, on rainy days, that our parents would take us for a treat. We got to sit on window stools, chrome frames and red leather tops in true U.S. fifties style, and drink Coca Cola.  From the bottle with a straw.  And even on those days when the café windows were so steamed up that we couldn’t see out, and the condensing droplets ran down onto the narrow Formica shelf, we sat there sipping, listening to a juke box, and feeling hip, groovy and cool all at the same time.  And so grown up.

 Polzeath High Street with the Snack Bar on the corner (1950s)

The building now houses a bookshop and newsagents

One Thing Led To Another...

It was a sunny Monday morning, and taking advantage of a quiet start to the parish week I was sorting through the remainder of a hundred and more photographs of churches after my last foray into Worcestershire in May of 2013.  There remains much to catalogue and even more to write, and no doubt I will get around to at least some of it before I become part of the very history I am trying to gather together.

Early on I found three images of the delightful church of St Edburga in the hamlet of Leigh, some six miles to the north west of the city of Worcester.  Built by monks in the year 1100 it is revealed history in stone, but also contains much more information about the surrounding community.  That will certainly be one of my next essays – and will include a few words about the strange cult of Edburga, or Eadburh, of Winchester, a nun that somehow gripped the imagination of many in the late tenth century. But wandering as it usually does, especially on a Monday morning out of sight of coffee, my mind half-remembered another parish church, also near to Worcester of the same name.  One that I have only driven past many years ago, and generally ignored on account of it being Victorian in origin.  But perhaps I ought to pay it more respect on account of its previous history, and the stalwart efforts of one of its nineteenth century vicars.

The church of St Edburga in Abberton, to the south east of Worcester, was built in 1882 in the “Gothic revival” fashion.  (It does have a Norman font – surely worth a visit in itself.)  There was clearly an earlier church on the site but I have yet to unearth the ecclesiastical history.  With regard to the neighborhood:  At the time that the font was first used the community was listed in Domesday Book (1086) as, in the Manor of Pershore, having four point three households comprising twenty four villagers, eight smallholders and seven slaves.  And of course they all would have gone to church on Sunday. 

But what caught my eye in the Worcestershire census returns of 1851 was that Abberton retained a population of eighty souls, nineteen of whom were the children of the local vicar.  Definitely a subject to look into…

A cold coming we had of it, just the worst time of the year. T.S. Eliot. “Journey of the Magi.”

I know that it’s unfair on the Feast of the Epiphany to mis-quote T.S.Eliot but it seemed an apt line to introduce what the American media are describing as a “Polar Vortex,” (CNN, NBC and Fox News) and a “Major Arctic Outbreak,” (The Weather Channel.) 

Yes, it’s going to be very cold for two days - although not as frigid on Long Island as it is going to be in parts of inland United States.  I’m not going to predict minus numbers (numbers in both senses of the word) because the smarter meteorologists are very good at doing that and getting very excited as computer animations swiftly turn blue on the screens behind them.  But I am going to suggest that if everybody is sensible and looks out for their neighbor then, guess what?  We are going to survive this temporary deep freeze.

Growing up in a large and rambling country vicarage in the 1960s English Midlands we knew all about low winter temperatures.  They announced their arrival in late December and stayed until early March. And even if the sun shone the dark passageways of the house never truly thawed out.  Because except in two rooms (maybe three) there was nothing to thaw them out. 

The two warmer spots were my father’s study, where a huge coal fire burned from dawn until dusk, and the kitchen.  And it was there that the family met, ate, read, did homework and generally lived during our waking hours, for the kitchen contained a wonderful coal-burning Rayburn – a stove that not only cooked food and warmed the whole room, but also heated water for washing and hot drinks.

And that, devotees of central heating, was that.  I mentioned a third room:  The living room did have a small, two bar electric fire in the closed-up fireplace.  But what good was that in a room that measured about four hundred square feet?  And the upstairs?  Heat upstairs?  Unthinkable, even when the ice formed on the inside of the bedroom windows and the blankets had to be properly aired or else they would also stiffen up in the cold.  We dressed for bed, and dressed some more in the morning. 

And even when temperatures dropped well below seasonal expectations – I really don’t recall it being a news story.